Chris Christie spectacle obscured report on veterans' suicides

Focused on a bridge scandal, we overlook news about veterans dying

Bonnie and Danny McAlpin, of California, lost their son, Iraq War veteran Rusty McAlpin, to suicide not long after he left the Army. (Rick Loomis, Tribune Newspapers photo)

Political scandals enthrall us and pettiness blinds us and real problems pass us by, often unnoticed.

I'm as guilty of this as the next. Last week I couldn't take my eyes off New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's news conference, where he tried to distance himself from an act of political revenge that closed lanes of traffic on the George Washington Bridge and put lives at risk.

Bridgegate, as it's called, is serious business, a grotesque misuse of power that has put a potential Republican presidential candidate's career at risk. And I joined the masses Thursday in watching with a voyeur's curiosity as Christie fielded questions on the scandal.

That same day, a report was released by the Veterans Health Administration. It found that the number of young male veterans committing suicide has spiked in recent years, jumping 44 percent from 2009 to 2011.

So wrapped up was I in the New Jersey drama that I didn't notice the report, didn't process the appalling reality of its data until a couple of days later: An increasing number of men between the ages of 18 and 29, men who served this country, many who fought overseas and survived, are returning home and taking their own lives.

And the number of suicides among female veterans was also up 11.5 percent over the same period of time, a smaller jump but no less concerning.

This all went largely unnoticed.

It shouldn't have.

While investigations are launched into the New Jersey fiasco, while Republican operatives try to insulate Christie and Democratic operatives try to attack him, who's paying attention to this study? Who's addressing a problem that can be fixed, one that involves young men and women who deserve nothing but our best?

Let's face it, we're a muddled mess when it comes to politics.

We have millions of people unemployed, but can Democrats and Republicans come together to find a way to help them? No. Republicans can please their base by cutting unemployment benefits to 1.3 million long-term unemployed, and Democrats can make weak claims of progress by creating a handful of "Promise Zones," which may or may not help economically depressed pockets of the country.

Health care — which millions of Americans lack — has devolved into an ideological quagmire. The Affordable Care Act — a well-intentioned law that needs work — is either embraced by people unwilling to compromise or rejected by people devoted to seeing it fail.

The focus is only on which political party is winning or losing, on how posturing might affect the next election, not on the millions of actual people who need help.

Yet there's time for daylong filibusters. There's time for bills everyone knows will never become law.

On Friday, the day after the veterans suicide report came out, two U.S. senators from Illinois — Dick Durbin, a Democrat, and Mark Kirk, a Republican — found the time and bipartisan wherewithal to propose naming the headquarters of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Washington after famed Chicago lawman Eliot Ness.

Clearly that's a pressing issue.

The veterans study did contain some good news. The suicide rate among male Veterans Health Administration patients ages 35 to 64 dropped by 16 percent from 1999 to 2010.

So some of what's being done to prevent suicides among veterans is working, but it's not helping the younger men. Are they less willing to address their problems and seek help? Are there generational problems with the VA services being offered?

And why is the suicide rate among female veterans increasing? Is enough being done to reach these women?

These are questions that need to be answered. And they should receive at least the same level of political attention as a months-old traffic jam.

What happened in New Jersey is significant — I don't mean to downplay it as nothing. But it is, at the end of the day, a manifestation of politics at its worst.

It has left us focusing on the mess, missing the things that matter.

We can do better.

More importantly, the women and young men who have risked their lives for us, whose inner battles are still being waged, deserve better. And we should settle, unequivocally, for nothing less.